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CARTOON/COLUMN: Our leaders are too human not to fight

John Boehner’s voice faltered. Tears welled in his eyes. He fought to finish the sentence.

“… chasing the American Dream.”

It was a very human moment for the man who is about to become Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. The election night crowd cheered him on and he continued to speak, haltingly, about the hard road he has taken to the top.

I hope the moment was a reminder to those who are not at all happy with the results of Tuesday’s vote that the people on the other side are not enemies, not villains. For both better and worse, they are all just humans, exactly like the rest of us.

It is a lesson I wish the Tea Party crowd would also learn. We’ve endured a season of them vilifying the President, painting Hitler mustaches on his image and ranting about taking back “our country,” as if those who support Barack Obama are somehow not real Americans who “took” the country through a legitimate vote.

But that’s the way it goes when rhetoric gets so heated and extreme that an election can seem like Armageddon instead of just another passage in the life of a democratic nation.

Now that Republicans have been carried back into control of the House by a wave of angst and anger, they would be wise to not believe the hot rhetoric they employed to get themselves there.

A case in point: For months, in speeches and attack ads, Republicans blasted “Obamacare” and told voters the Democrats’ health care legislation – the principal achievement of Obama’s first two years in office – is a monstrosity that they will repeal as soon as they get back in charge. Now, victorious, they insist the American people have spoken and repeal is high on their agenda.

Watch out. It’s one thing to win votes by drawing a gross caricature of “government-run health care.” It’s another to start dismantling reforms that now keep people with pre-existing conditions from being denied health insurance, allow young people to stay on their parents’ insurance to age 26 and raise the hope of guaranteed care for 20 million folks who cannot now afford or obtain insurance.

Once the fog of exaggeration is cleared away, voters will find there’s a lot to like about “Obamacare.” Republicans who try to take it all away will quickly find they’ve given Democrats an easy propaganda tool with which to lure back many of the estranged swing voters who boosted Republicans this year, just as they boosted Democrats in the last two elections. In polls, opposition or support of the health care plan has depended largely on how the plan is described. There has never been a solid consensus that the plan is a mistake, despite what GOP attacks ads claimed.

The fact is, the voice of the American people is not unitary. There are many voices and most of the time they contradict each other. The country is still deeply split between two ideological camps, left and right, that battle for the hearts, minds and ballots of an independent middle that seems to sway with the breeze and vote from the gut. Tuesday’s gut reaction helped the Republicans. But an over-reaching assessment of their mandate could easily lead Boehner and the new House leaders – prodded by their large new cadre of zealous freshmen – into trouble. It happened in 1994; it could happen again.

The perennial Republican advantage is that the USA is a center-right country with a relentless right wing and a left wing that seldom shows much potency outside of the big cities. For liberals to succeed, they need to restrain their leftward impulses and achieve progressive goals by framing them in a context of common sense and traditional values. No one was better at that than Bill Clinton. For conservatives to succeed, they need to resist the tug of their own militants because, though Americans lean conservative, they see themselves as centrists, not extremists.

So, no one should be happier than Republicans that Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell and a number of the wackier Tea Party candidates did not succeed on election night. Rand Paul and Marco Rubio are not nearly as likely to end up as targets of ridicule on Saturday Night Live. Nevertheless, Paul and Rubio and their compatriots will push to make something of this victory by turning back the leftward advances of the last two years. That pressure will nudge the House majority toward dogmatism and undercut any inclination to negotiate and compromise.

House Republicans, of course, were already an uncompromising bunch. Given that they really cannot govern with only the House in their hands, and given that neither the president nor Senate Democrats will be able to pass much legislation now that Nancy Pelosi’s big majority has been decimated, one goal will override all others: winning advantage in the next election.

Yes, the real result of Tuesday’s vote is that the 2012 campaign has begun.

Of course, this is not what anyone voted for. People are clearly desperate for someone to take charge and fix the economic mess in which we are mired. But, with government suddenly divided between two hostile camps, a fix has been rendered impossible, unless partisans on both sides show an unprecedented ability to set aside political goals and ideology and work together for the common good.

That is almost certainly too much to expect from the men and women we just elected. They are, after all, only human.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.